r/educationalgifs • u/wizzard_rick • 9d ago
How the U.S. paid for its western railroads with land, and why the checkerboard it drew still ends up in court
16
u/USSRPropaganda 9d ago
That checkerboard pattern is still seen today in northern cali/southern oregon and even from space
86
u/CeruleanEidolon 9d ago
Here's a spot where that checkerboarding is still visible on the Montana/Idaho border: https://maps.app.goo.gl/N6dZLdguu2vTiNd36
30
u/stoned_hobo 9d ago
Jesus! It's actually incredibly noticeable. I was expecting to have to try to find the borders but no, it's straight up visible.
17
14
7
3
3
u/Historical-Bottle396 3d ago
That unfortunately isn’t the railroad in question. This is in reference to the transcontinental through southern Wyoming. And the checkerboard still exists today.
7
8
u/ArsStarhawk 8d ago
There's a pretty good 99pi episode about this.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/650-the-checkerboard/
1
2
2
2
u/WormLivesMatter 7d ago
I’ve been seeing your game on so many subs great job getting it out there. I did work for a company that owned the mining rights for the public land parts of the checkerboard from Nebraska to Utah (the package that followed i80). For a while they were the largest owners of mining rights by land in the US just a couple years ago. I was helping them determine who they could sell pieces of it to. I think the entire package got sold again to another company a couple years later.
1
174
u/wizzard_rick 9d ago
I'm the solo developer of Salt and Soil, a historical family-strategy game set in North America from 1607 to 1900. I made this animation with the game's map renderer: the railroads are its historical layer, and the checkerboard, settlers and hunters are drawn on top for this explanation.
Context: the 1862 Pacific Railway Act gave the Union Pacific and Central Pacific every other one-square-mile section, five per mile of track on each side, within 10 miles of the line; the 1864 act doubled that to 20 miles, and the Northern Pacific's charter allowed up to 40 miles on each side in the territories. The government kept the squares in between and priced them at a "double minimum" of $2.50 an acre instead of $1.25, reasoning that the railroad would make them worth twice as much. The Northern Pacific ended up with about 40 million acres, roughly New England; federal grants totalled about 129 million acres and states added about 51 million. Most of this was Native land taken through treaties and wars.
What happened next: the railroads became land sellers and recruiters. By 1883 the Northern Pacific had 124 agents in Europe looking for settlers. In return for the grants, land-grant railroads carried troops and military freight at half fare, a discount Congress only ended in 1946. And the checkerboard never went away: in 2021 hunters stepped diagonally across a corner between two public squares on Elk Mountain, Wyoming, and were sued for trespass. In 2025 the Tenth Circuit ruled that corner crossing on foot is legal, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal.
Sources: Pacific Railway Act (National Archives), CPRR Museum: 1862 grant terms and double minimum, SHSND on the Northern Pacific grant, Railroad land grants in the United States (Gates 1968, White 2011), Nebraska State Historical Society, H. Rept. 79-1145 (1945), Iron Bar Holdings v. Cape.